Such a record carrier and device are known from the European Patent EP 0 397 238. The special codes therein comprise special information containing for instance control information for recording, such as write power, location of special areas on the record carrier, a reference recording speed, disc application codes, disc type and so on. This has been applied in products commonly known under the name of recordable Compact Disc or CD-R. In practice the amount of information to be stored in the special codes proves to be limited. To solve this, the definition of the special codes could be changed in order to be able to increase the capacity of information to be stored therein. However, this will result in incompatibility with existing systems and standards present on the market.